According to Joe Palazzolo, federal judges have cited Wikipedia in decisions nearly 100 times in the past 5 years. If Palazzolo is correct, it makes me feel a lot more comfortable about utilizing the dark arts of researching from time to time for this page. After all, though I tend to think the topics discussed on this blog are interesting, and sometimes even important, it can't be true that anything written here has more of an impact on society than an actual Circuit Court ruling.
Now, it isn't like the citations to Wikipedia are to cases. From what Palazzolo wrote, they are mostly to pop-culture references such as Blazing Saddles, Elvis Presley and happy hour. Nonetheless, the reliance on Wikipedia as a source, even for the most innocuous of tidbits, is certainly a vote of confidence from some of the nation's best minds in the ability of our society to police the flow of information to itself. That's an interesting thought indeed.
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